He Could Probably Design an Experiment to Explain It.
Bravery has been brewing inside David Eagleman, Albuquerque Academy Class of 1989, for a long time.
On a fall day in the 1980s, when he’d only been a sixth grader at the Academy for a matter of weeks, hot-air balloons touched down on campus, and one pilot asked if anyone wanted a ride. David hopped in. The balloon rose back into the sky, and David realized he was the only kid who’d taken advantage of the offer. “I thought everyone else would, too, but no one did. I watched the Academy recede in the distance,” David recalls. “The balloon touched down three-quarters of a mile from campus, and I ran back.”
The administrators weren’t pleased. “The whole time I was getting yelled at, I couldn’t stop smiling. That ride was one of the highlights of my sixth-grade year.”
That fearlessness has taken him in many directions throughout the intervening decades.
In addition to earning a Ph.D. in neuroscience and running a research laboratory, he went on to become a New York Times best-selling author, having penned seven non-fiction books and a book of fiction, SUM, which is published in 32 languages and was turned into two operas. He made the hit television series The Brain with David Eagleman on PBS and The Creative Brain on Netflix. He has founded two companies – Neosensory and BrainCheck – and he directs the non-profit Center for Science and Law. At Stanford University, David teaches Brain Plasticity, Literature and the Brain, and The Brain and the Law.
Inspired by Carl Sagan and his television series Cosmos, David has forged a path that has led to groundbreaking work in neuroscience while making it a priority to express those ideas in a way that connects with anyone who loves to learn. “Sagan was a researcher with lots of papers to his name,” David says, “but the immortality of his contribution comes from capturing the beauty of the scientific endeavor and disseminating it broadly.”
Although he’s best known for his work as a scientist, David majored in British and American literature. “I’ve always loved transmitting ideas via the written word. We all hold our own internal models of the world, and to translate any concept from your own internal model to someone else’s is a game of understanding how their model differs from yours.
“One thing that’s always been very clear to me is who my audience is. It’s my 16-year-old self. It’s the younger version of me who didn’t know that particular fact of the world but would have loved to.”
Albuquerque Academy helped nurture teenage David’s instinct to explore what’s possible. Teachers like Don Smith, Mickey Prokopiak, Gene Gardenhire, John Gray, Frances Robertson, and Sean Murphy “all had a tremendous influence on me. They took their jobs seriously of preparing the next generation to be critical thinkers.
“And beyond that, one of the great strengths of the Academy,” David says, “is teaching intellectual bravery. That means facing an unanswered question and thinking ‘Maybe I can answer it. If someone else can give a run at it, why not me?’”
Beyond his other endeavors, David also runs the podcast Inner Cosmos, which last year became the #1 science podcast in the nation. Why do we laugh? Why do you see something everywhere after you’ve seen it once? Why do familiar things lose their shine (and what can we do about it)? What sticks in your brain and what doesn’t? How far can you trust your memory? These are some of the questions he’s tackled so far, and he’s just signed with iHeartMedia for his next season, so keep listening for his novel takes on the brain that shine a light on our daily lives.
He continues to find new ways to share his passion for science. He’s recently written a screenplay for an animated feature film and is launching a small new AI company to help trigger specific memories in people with dementia. He gives a great number of public talks (many lately on AI’s relationship to the brain). Two years ago he launched a production company in Hollywood to make television and movies that are meaningfully related to science; the company, Cognito Film, currently has 12 projects in development, both fiction and non-fiction.
Through this varied approach, David has taken neuroscience in different directions. “The best part about science is that you can ask the questions you care about. There are 100 ways to do boring science, but there are 1,000 open routes to do fascinating science.”
Because we don’t know what jobs will exist in the future, he says, there’s no point in treating education vocationally. “I have the deepest gratitude to the Academy for the quality of education,” David says. “It gives students a real headstart to not only get a foundational education but to also develop the courage to say, ‘I could do that.’”
